Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Faulkner for February

February is for Faulkner. He is the reason why February is
called what it is called; ergo we will be exposing ourselves to toxic amounts
of Faulkner in February. There is so much Faulkner to choose from that it would
be foolish to pick only one; ergo Choose-Your-Own-Faulkner it is! Faulkner,
Faulkner, Faulkner. If you say his name three times in the dark with a mirror
Beetlejuice will appear… or maybe Son of Sam… or Jerry’s van? Something will
happen; maybe you will get stuck in a three page sentence. I’ll find out after I
post this on the interwebs.

The format for this free-for-all is simple. There are five
notable works by Faulkner:

these also double as the five
greatest pieces of art from the last five million years (anything before that
gets confusing because of the lack of coherent recordkeeping by the dinosaurs;
they didn’t realize just how much influence they would have on future generations)

Choose one from the list and find
a Vintage International copy of it, the older editions have typos and errors
and other things that occur when an author is too far ahead of their time to be
read completely, also as a result of lazy editors and typewriters with hanging
chads.

I would love it if a couple
people could read each, or some people could read multiple and then we can talk
about our individual novels and then talk about the style and digress into
talking about Cloud Atlas. Come
prepared with a sentence to read out loud, and make sure it is a good one,
otherwise I’ll go A Rose for Emily on you: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html

Also of note: Faulkner took Joyce’s
Ulysses on his honeymoon: “I was
married at such a young age that I was not able to fully understand the scope
and breadth of what I was getting myself into and thus was relegated to literary
boners, among the pieces that forced my blood to pump was James Joyce’s bearcat
Ulysses, which kept me warm on those
hot Mississippi nights after fishing in the stream of consciousness.”